The Story Is Not In The Plot

The Reason Literacy Is Important Is That Literature Is The Operating Instructions. The Best Manual We Have. The Most Useful Guide To The Country We're Visiting, Life.

When The Enemy Enthusiastically Embraces You, And The Fellow Countrymen Bitterly Reject You, It Is Hard Not To Wonder If You Are, In Fact, A Traitor.

We Have Inhabited Both The Actual And The Imaginary Realms For A Long Time. But We Don't Live In Either Place The Way Our Parents Or Ancestors Did. Enchantment Alters With Age, And With The Age. We Know A Dozen Arthurs Now, All Of Them True. The Shire Changed Irrevocably Even In Bilbo's Lifetime. Don Quixote Went Riding Out To Argentina And Met Jorge Luis Borges There. Plus C'est La Même Chose, Plus ça Change.

There Was A Wall. It Did Not Look Important. It Was Built Of Uncut Rocks Roughly Mortared. An Adult Could Look Right Over It, And Even A Child Could Climb It. Where It Crossed The Roadway, Instead Of Having A Gate It Degenerated Into Mere Geometry, A Line, An Idea Of Boundary. But The Idea Was Real. It Was Important. For Seven Generations There Had Been Nothing In The World More Important Than That Wall. Like All Walls It Was Ambiguous, Two-faced. What Was Inside It And What Was Outside It Depended Upon Which Side Of It You Were On.

In Innocence There Is No Strength Against Evil, Said Sparrowhawk, A Little Wryly. But There Is Strength In It For Good.